February 2009 - Posts

The RDs (Microsoft Regional Directors) are one of the most amazing groups of people I deal with and I'm honoured and humbled to be a member of the group. There is rare talent amongst the group. Every day, I find myself amazed by both the breadth and depth Read More...

Our colleague at Solid Quality Mentors : Ron Talmage is a writing machine! There's another new whitepaper with his name on it along with Sanjay Mishra from Microsoft. It covers the performance of database snapshots under I/O intensive workloads. You'll Read More...

This press pass article http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/feb09/02-12CVPRetailStoresPR.mspx makes it look pretty clear that Microsoft Retail Stores are on the way. David Porter has been appointed to head up this initiative. He's been at DreamWorks Read More...

There has been quite a bit of confusion now over the future directions for the PerformancePoint product. I'm glad to see a few of the PASS chapters tackling the topic head-on. Adrian from the Wellington chapter has organised Rob Hawthorne to present a Read More...

Today officially ended up getting to 46.4 in Melbourne. That's 115.5 for those still on Fahrenheit and way, way too hot no matter what you measure it in. So we headed off to see a movie. Took a while to park. No-one seemed to want to park anywhere that Read More...

A while back, I took a look at Levelator (from the Conversations Network) and it was a bit rough around the edges. It's a tool that take an audio conversation like a podcast and evens out the audio levels of the different speakers. This is no easy trick. Read More...

I've finally got show 43 posted up today. In this show, Jessica Moss discusses Reporting Services in 2008 and overall lessons learned with Reporting Services in all versions. You can download it now from http://www.sqldownunder.com . Enjoy! Read More...

Another item that I've seen used a lot which is now deprecated is the :: function calling sequence. If you have code like: SELECT * FROM :: fn_virtualfilestats ( 2 , 1 ); You should now instead be coding it as: SELECT * FROM sys . fn_virtualfilestats Read More...

At a meeting I was at a few months back, it was noted that in a future version of SQL Server, the intention was to disallow results being returned from triggers. That surprised me somewhat. My main concern with this was about my ability to debug triggers. Read More...

Some time back I posted about Logins and SIDs and I’ve had a number of people ask me for examples. So I’ve updated the post here. A very common issue that's raised in the newsgroups relates to SQL Server logins that need to be moved between servers. When Read More...